reduce unwanted friction to support creators (such as multiple membership tiers, which is extra work for creators & high decision fatigue for supporters). Patreon is wrongly inspired by the crowdfunding model of Kickstarter.

introduce integrations and tools for creators (for eg, a paywall equivalent for small publishers), and therefore act as a single sign-on for audience to access paywall-ed content everywhere.

drive the subscription prices down as the supporter volume increase. Currently, it is a high fixed cost to set up paywalls and other membership tools, and creators/publishers are forced to squeeze more juice out of paying audience.

offer a superior UX for the audience and eventually become mobile-first.

idk, it sounds too obvious, maybe something is fundamentally wrong with the way I think.

Once upon a time, success of creators were more or less based on lucky breaks. It could be a viral video, or being the first 100 of a new platform (vine). It was hard to maintain a loyal following as an indie artist. That is so not the case anymore. Plethora of platforms like Tumblr, podcasts, Instagram, Youtube etc helped creators build a loyal following, which is their’s to keep and nurture. However, the way they monetise their content has not changed much probably for the last couple of decades. It very much revolve around ads and brand promotions. If the distribution is figured, why hasn’t monetisation evolved so much? Even crowdfunding hasn’t changed a lot in the past decade or so (ever since it was invented). I don’t have a proper answer to this. Maybe because ads turned out to be so profitable for platforms and aggregators that they decided to make it the de facto monetisation method? Maybe they realised (correctly) that taking a piece of creator-supporter pie would be much harder than taking a bigger cut of ad revenue? In a creator-supporter relationship, the role for middle man is fairly low – probably that? I don’t know, I think it’s crazy.

The title might sound very counterintuitive, given mastering anything require in-depth knowledge. So how is not knowing helpful?

a) Selective ignorance. It is the practice of selectively ignoring distracting, irrelevant or otherwise unnecessary information received, such as e-mails, news reports, etc. Probably the most powerful weapon at the disposal of highly effective people.

b) Admission of lack of knowledge is the first step towards acquiring knowledge. This might sound very generic or trivial. However, it will be mind boggling to notice how many practice this in their life. Because emotion stand before reason, we tend to avoid any admission of guilt and use every chance we get to show off our knowledge, no matter how limited it is. Also, it is easy to slip up our obliviousness when we express more than we should. It is like an open wound.

Like one of 57 laws from Robert Greene’s book, it is better to keep quiet than saying more than we should.

Admission of not knowing something opens up tremendous possibilities. For one, others would be more interested in sharing their thoughts on the subject than if you had expressed mastery.

About

I am a terrible writer and a perfectionist. Which pretty much means I rarely get anything published. But I have some interesting ideas about tech, startups, management, atheism and other things which I think some of you might find helpful. So I’m doing this. This blog is an unedited, tl;dr version of my thoughts. Sorry for the trouble!